


What Child Is This

by awomannotagirl



Series: her one wild and precious life [3]
Category: The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2017-02-13
Packaged: 2018-09-11 23:42:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9043643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awomannotagirl/pseuds/awomannotagirl
Summary: With the birth of every child, possibility is born anew. Even if Andy would rather it wasn't.Or, Andy revisits her most difficult decision, with the chance of making everything turn out differently.





	1. Chapter 1

_Saturday, December 25_

Andy feels washed out and empty, and guilty, because this is a joyful day. The chair creaks as she leans her head back into the wall. Even nice hospitals have terrible waiting rooms, she thinks, and wonders why, though she supposes it’s better to have institutional money apportioned to, say, dialysis machines.  
  
It is just after six a.m. and it’s already been a very long day. She’s grateful to be alone, though she realizes she’s going to have to make a reappearance soon. It’s been perhaps an hour since she left the birthing suite with a mumbled excuse about giving everyone a little more space. At that moment, Miranda hadn’t had the attention for anything but her brand-new grandchildren and the daughter who had spent the previous twenty-six hours dragging them into the world; at some point, though, she’ll start to wonder where Andy has gone.  
  
Then Caroline comes in, and Andy makes herself brighten up. The last thing she wants to do is export her mood to someone who’s genuinely, unmitigatedly happy.  
  
Caroline is carrying a paper cup of what surely must be coffee, and she looks exhausted despite the blissful shine. “Those poor kids,” she says. “Not only will they never have their own birthdays, they’ll never even get birthdays. Or else they won’t get Christmas.”  
  
Andy smiles affectionately at Caroline. Caro’s wearing a loose men’s button-down shirt and a worn pair of jeans and almost no makeup (it looks like no makeup, but Andy has a sharp eye after all these years with Miranda). She still looks terrific. It strikes Andy, not for the first time, that for all the meticulous attention Miranda pays to the details of ensembles, clothes aren’t attractive without the ability to wear them well, and a person who does wear clothes well can make anything look good. Caroline has inherited or absorbed that ability from her mother, and her deliberate abandonment of high fashion for academia doesn’t make her less well dressed.  
  
Caroline blows on her coffee through the tiny flap in the plastic lid. “This is crappy but it’s hot,” she says, taking a sip. She looks up and meets Andy’s eyes, and Andy can see her seeing the evidence of Andy’s last hour. “What’s wrong?” she asks quietly.  
  
“Nothing,” Andy says. “Really. Nothing,” as Caroline raises an eyebrow. “It’s emotional, that’s all. Cassidy just had her babies! It’s amazing!” To her own unspeakable horror, her eyes well again with the tears she’d thought she was done with and she looks quickly away from Caro’s concerned eyes.  
  
Caroline reaches out and touches Andy’s shoulder, and Andy jerks as if Caro has tased her. “Don’t,” she says. “I can’t ... Just let me hold it together, okay?”  
  
Caroline sits back but she doesn’t look away. Andy can almost feel her working out what’s happening. She keeps her own gaze on the worn chair across the room from her own worn chair, and she tries to think of other things.  
  
“I didn’t realize it would be hard for you,” Caroline says after several moments.  
  
“Me neither,” Andy says, and takes a harsh breath that she somehow manages, barely, to keep from becoming a sob.  
  
There is another charged silence, and then Caro asks gently, “You would have had your own? If you hadn’t been with Mom?”  
  
Andy shakes her head, a tiny back-and-forth that is almost too much effort. “No idea,” she says tonelessly. _Who would you be, if your life were completely different?_  
  
“We always wondered,” Caroline says. “For a while we kind of expected that we were going to get a much younger sibling. And then it didn’t happen, and ...” She spread her hands.  
  
“No,” Andy whispered. “It didn’t.” And that’s it. The dam breaks, and she’s leaning over, crying and heaving and crying. Caroline crouches in front of her with her arms around her shoulders, sensibly not trying to get her to calm down.  
  
She does calm down, eventually. “Christ, I must be a mess,” she mutters.  
  
“So what,” Caroline says. “Be a mess. It’s okay.”  
  
“I have to pull it together before your mom sees me,” Andy rebuts, and at that moment, of course, Miranda walks into the room.  
  
Andy looks up, frozen, and meets her eyes. There is a moment—Andy can’t actually tell how long they look at each other because it feels like half a day but also like an instant—in which Miranda drinks in Andy’s swollen, red eyes and running nose, and then Miranda says in the clear, distant way that she talks to her underlings, “Caroline, will you give us the room for a few minutes.”  
  
“Sure, Mom,” says the traitorous Caroline, though she gives Andy’s shoulders a squeeze as she stands and sidles out.  
  
Miranda slides into the chair next to Andy and puts her hand on the center of Andy’s back. Andy is still leaning forward, her elbows on her thighs, and she doesn’t straighten up. Having already cried herself out twice this morning, she has no desire to have a conversation that will almost surely mean she’ll do it again.  
  
“Were you going to tell me?” Miranda says finally. “Or were you just going to do that infernal Midwestern thing you do and suffer nobly in silence?”  
  
“God, I don’t know,” Andy says, so tired she can’t even spin it. “Probably. Everyone’s so happy, I don’t want to be ... this.” She waves a hand at herself.  
  
“Is it—” Miranda stops herself, and says under her breath, “Of course it is.” She rubs Andy’s back in small circles for a long moment, and then says ruefully, “I didn’t know.”  
  
“I didn’t say anything,” Andy says. She shakes her head impatiently. “And it’s not as if I’ve been pining for nine months. I'm having a moment. The moment will end.”  
  
Miranda is silent, and Andy can feel her struggling not to enter into the self-accusatory spiral that she’s prone to. _Another thing I took from you, Andrea. Another experience you should have had, would have had, if you’d had a better, more suitable partner._  
  
Andy tries to head it off before it can get going. “It’s not your fault, Miranda. If it had been crucially important to me to have children, I would have had some goddamn children. I made choices.”  
  
“You did,” Miranda agrees, but she doesn’t sound as if she is convinced.  
  
  


Andy makes it through another few hours in the cocoon of Cassidy and the babies by avoiding eye contact with Caroline and Miranda as much as she can. Shortly after noon the new mother and new twins move from the birthing suite to a room on the postpartum floor, and once they’re settled, Andy and Miranda finally go home for their first rest since they got Derrick’s call Friday morning.  
  
On another day they would have walked home across the park, but that’s a bit much even for Andy at this point; she can’t imagine how tired Miranda must feel. Adrenaline had kept them awake through the labor and the birth, but Andy can see Miranda visibly wilting. She gets them a cab on Tenth Avenue and they’re speeding home.  
  
“Thank God for Muslims,” Miranda says.  
  
Andy is briefly puzzled by the apparent non sequitur, but Miranda nods toward the driver’s taxi license with its markedly Arabic name, and she understands. Most places in this country, it would be next to impossible to get a cab on Christmas Day.  
  
They give Hamid an enormous tip when he drops them at the door of the townhouse, and receive an incongruous but sincere “Merry Christmas!” in return. The house is quiet. Andy desperately wants to go upstairs and plunge into bed, into oblivion, but it isn’t practical.  
  
“It’s like jet lag,” Miranda warns. “If we go to bed now, our sleep will be off for days.”  
  
“I haven’t pulled an all-nighter since ...” Andy hunts for the last time. “God, I can’t even remember.”  
  
“Rio?”  
  
“Maybe.” They smile knowingly at each other, splayed out across the couch in the upstairs study. “But even then, we did go to bed at dawn.” Miranda lifts an eyebrow. “We went to _sleep_ at dawn,” Andy corrects herself.  
  
“We had a nap,” Miranda says. Her eyelids droop, and she reiterates, “We can’t nap now. We’ll pass out and wake up at two in the morning.”  
  
“When do you think we can go to bed?” Andy asks, knowing that there’s a little bit of whine in her question.  
  
“Mmm,” Miranda says. “It’s almost one. Eight?”  
  
It’s like torture—exactly like torture, Andy reminds Miranda, sleep deprivation being explicitly forbidden by the Geneva Conventions—but they do it. They sit in the least comfortable chairs, listen to _Carmina Burana_ , read the last two days’ newspapers and talk about everything except what happened at the hospital.  
  
Eight o’clock comes at last. And then, naturally, Andy can’t sleep. She stares at the ceiling, trying to separate herself from her racing mind and her twitching body.  
  
“You’re _vibrating_ ,” Miranda says out of the darkness, rolling toward her and putting a hand on Andy’s stomach under her pajama top. She pushes up, lazily, until her hand rests flat on Andy’s sternum, between her breasts.  
  
“Sorry,” Andy says contritely. “I’d go to sleep if I could.”  
  
“I’d wear you out if I could,” Miranda says, and the thought sends a quick lick of fire through Andy. It is actually exactly what she needs: to be grounded completely in her body, to let Miranda wring her out, to exhaust her energy in climax. But Miranda is just as tired and twenty-five years older, and it would be cruel even to ask.  
  
“Take care of yourself, darling,” Miranda whispers in her ear, circling her hand over Andy’s breast. “Let me be here.”  
  
Andy smiles into the dark and moves her hand between her legs. Her love is still, always, a step ahead. She strokes herself, aware of Miranda’s attention, her pleasure in Andy’s pleasure, even through the fog of fatigue. When, on the verge, she says, “Please, inside me—just slide inside me,” Miranda obliges, pushing deep into her and holding there, unlocking Andy’s release. Andy visits a fantasy in that moment that she hasn’t had in years: the one where Miranda’s fingers force the blossom of more than an orgasm, where some grace or magic or God turns the tiny explosion in the center of her body into life. Tears trickle from the corners of her eyes, but she isn’t crying, not like before. She has never told Miranda how desperately she’d wanted that impossibility—not just to be pregnant, not just to feel a baby grow within her, but to carry _Miranda’s_ baby. She has never, honestly, been interested in anything else, and of course by the time they met, Miranda and her oocytes were long past any such thing. The regret is lessened, Andy thinks, by the fact that she didn’t miss her chance. She never had it.  
  
Miranda kisses her on the temple, and though she must surely taste the trail of salt, she doesn’t comment on it. And finally, Andy sleeps.  
  


 

_Tuesday, December 28_

The twins—the new twins—have come home in triumph to their apartment. They’re clearly insensible of the majesty of the occasion, though, alternately dozing and yowling.  
  
Cassidy looks tired, but not exhausted. Derrick looks exhausted. Caroline, who is staying with Miranda and Andy at the townhouse, looks like she could run a 5K and then write a novel. There is just the tiniest amount of resentment toward her from every side.  
  
Andy holds one of the babies, jouncing it (she’s not sure whether it’s the boy or the girl) gently to keep it pacified. Neither infant has a name—or, more accurately, each has several possible names, none of which is yet the clear winner—so they’re being referred to as “the loud one” and “the squirmy one.” Andy has the squirmy one.  
  
“I need a bagel,” Cassidy says. She’s breastfeeding the loud one. “Mom.”  
  
Miranda looks up at her, a frown etching tiny lines between her eyes. “We can call—”  
  
“The best bagel place doesn’t deliver,” Cassidy insists.  
  
“I can go,” Derrick says, standing up from the kitchen stool he’s been slumped on.  
  
“You need to go to bed,” Cassidy tells him.  
  
“You look like shit,” Caroline observes helpfully.  
  
“I can go,” Andy says, shifting the baby.  
  
“Oh no,” Cassidy says. “You got Squirmy to stop squirming. You aren’t going anywhere.”  
  
Miranda is clearly annoyed, but Caroline and Cassidy are each almost as much a force as their mother is, and added together they overwhelm her. Within minutes she’s been bundled up and sent out, and a grateful Derrick has headed down to the bedroom.  
  
Once Miranda and Derrick have been safely exiled, Caroline and Cassidy give each other the look, the one that signals the springing of a trap.  
  
“We’ve been talking, Andy,” Caroline says.  
  
Andy groans. “Guys, really. This moment is not about me.”  
  
“Oh, believe me, I’m aware of _that_ ,” Cassidy snorts. “This moment is totally about me. I just pushed two human heads out of an orifice that’s ordinarily the size of a dime.”  
  
Caroline shoots her a glance. “A dime?”  
  
“Well, maybe a nickel.”  
  
“I was thinking more like—”  
  
“Okay, stop,” Andy interrupts. “We really don’t have to compare orifices here.”  
  
“Right,” Cassidy agrees. “We were talking about _you_. We don’t know exactly why you never had a kid, whether it was you or Mom ...”  
  
“And it’s none of our business,” Caroline finishes. “But obviously it’s something you wanted. In some way.”  
  
Andy isn’t going to contest this, but she says, “In a fantasy. It couldn’t have worked in my actual life.”  
  
Cassidy is piercing her with Miranda’s best stare. “It’s not too late, Andy.”  
  
“Are you kidding?” She rolls her eyes; she’d throw up her hands, but she’s holding a warm, damp, finally-slumbering newborn. “It’s _way_ too late. I’m almost fifty, in case you hadn’t noticed. The Ovum Express is no longer coming through.”  
  
“You’re forty-six, Andy,” Caroline reminds her. “That’s not actually almost fifty.”  
  
“There’s a woman in my company,” Cassidy says conversationally, “who just had her first baby. And she’s fifty-five.”  
  
“IVF, of course,” adds Caroline. “And donor eggs.”  
  
Andy shakes her head, bewildered.  
  
The twins share the look again, for just a fraction of a second. Then Caroline says, “There’s not that much we can do for you, Andy, but we’ve sure as shit got eggs.”  
  
There is a long moment of silence. Andy feels her mouth drop open a little.  
  
“It turned out, when I started trying to get pregnant, that I had a low ovarian reserve. My twins,” Cassidy says, still very calmly, “are from Caro’s eggs.”  
  
“I’m practically a henhouse,” Caroline says. “When we did the egg retrieval, my response was off the charts.”  
  
“Point being,” Cassidy picks up the thread, “there are fourteen healthy frozen eggs sitting at my reproductive endocrinologist’s office.”  
  
They both look at Andy expectantly. She understands where they’re going with this, but she can’t formulate a coherent response.  
  
After a moment, Caroline says, “I know this might seem a little weird. Like having your own grandchild, maybe? But it’s not as if I’m your biological daughter.”  
  
“People do much weirder stuff all the time,” Cassidy chimes in.  
  
“And my eggs are half Mom,” Caroline says with a shrug.  
  
Half Miranda. Andy feels a sudden fierce surge of—what? Hope? As quickly, a wash of leaden reality extinguishes it. “Guys,” she says, her head dropping, “it’s not that simple. Your mom, my _wife_ , is over seventy. I know she doesn’t look it or act it, but she is. She isn’t going to want to parent an infant who’s younger than her grandchildren.”  
  
Caroline and Cassidy continue to look at Andy. “Maybe not,” Cassidy finally says. “But maybe.”  
  
“You haven’t asked,” Caroline finishes.  
  
“And even if she doesn’t.” Cassidy pauses and the twins look at each other again. “Maybe you still do.”  
  
Andy feels, actually _feels_ , the world split silently open at her feet. She’s falling. She can feel her body plunge. She takes a staggering step, turns, hands the bundle of baby to Caroline. “I’ve got to—I’ve got to—” she stutters. And with that she’s out of the apartment, into the stairwell, and despite the December chill, onto the sidewalk.


	2. Chapter 2

Andy has never become Caroline and Cassidy’s stepmother. Though they’ll use the word to people outside the family, they’ve always avoided pinning down a term for her among themselves. The twins have never said, “Our moms,” always “Mom and Andy.” 

Andy hadn’t moved in with Miranda, not formally and completely, until after they were married, at which point Cassidy and Caroline were going into their senior year of high school. The single year of cohabitation had not outweighed the simultaneous gift of a new, easy form of introduction: “This is my mom’s wife, Andy.” 

Truthfully, Andy hadn’t wanted stepmotherhood and still doesn’t. It had seemed like tremendous responsibility without the benefit of any authority. So she has been their … Andy. And she has been happy that way. It was she, after all, not Miranda, who got the panicked 4 a.m. call and drove to Hartford, Connecticut, to bail out a tearful, still half-drunk Caroline during her second year of grad school. It was she who Cassidy came to when the poet boyfriend turned out to be dreamy and abstracted not because he was contemplating an epic but because he was shooting heroin. She is a complicated cocktail of big sister and older and wiser friend; family, but not parent.

This odd distinction makes the current quandary more perplexing, if anything. Caroline isn’t Andy’s daughter. Andy would not be bearing her own granddaughter. 

But that’s splitting hairs, Andy thinks. It’s still weird. It still seems just as wrong as it does right. And it still, somehow, feels very, very right. Too right.

 

It’s after ten-thirty when Andy enters the foyer and closes the door of the house behind herself. She is a little bit drunk, a lot out of sorts. She spent the whole day wandering, trying to empty herself of thought without much success. She’d turned her phone on once to text _i’m ok. dont worry. be home later_ to Miranda, ignoring the messages that lit up the phone the moment she was connected to a network.

 _Shit:_ The light in the kitchen is on. If Miranda were just awake, she’d be in the study. If she’s in the kitchen, she’s waiting for Andy in the place she can’t miss her. All right, Andy thinks. I’ll go face it.

She comes into the kitchen and Miranda is at the table in the breakfast nook, some papers in front of her that she isn’t looking at. She looks—well, the overhead light is unforgiving, but she looks old. Elegant and beautiful, of course, but the sag at the corners of her eyes, the finely-lined texture of her skin ...

Andy slides into the nook across from her. She reaches out and puts her hand over Miranda’s; the hand doesn’t move, doesn’t twine its fingers with hers or place a palm to her palm.

“The girls told me what they’d said to you,” Miranda says at last.

Andy nods. She doubts they’ve actually told Miranda everything; did they really say, “Oh Mom, we told Andy to leave you”?

Miranda doesn’t take her eyes off Andy. She doesn’t yield, either. “It would be odd,” she says, brittle, “if you decided to have my daughter’s baby.”

Andy closes her eyes and sighs. “It’s not going to happen, Miranda.”

“Perhaps it should.” 

Andy’s eyes pop open. “We’ve talked about this,” she says, cautiously. “We didn’t talk about anything else for about a year at one point.”

“The world changes, doesn’t it.”

Andy keeps herself from groaning only with an effort. When Miranda starts to sound like the abstruse, elliptical commentary of a Zen monk, it means she is very, very emotional. She is preventing herself from tears and mawkishness—the deepest of humiliations, in Priestly-land—only by detaching herself as much as possible.

“You don’t want this.”

She sees Miranda swallow, controlling herself. “No, I don’t.” There is nothing soft in that. And then—“But I’m a mother, Andrea.”

Andy shakes her head slightly, puzzled.

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The most draining, the most infuriating, the most ...” She is looking from place to place around the kitchen, anywhere but at Andy. But then her eyes find her and lock on. “It was also the only thing I’ve ever done that made me feel like there was a reason for me to be alive.

“They are always better than you are. Better than you ever could have been. You can’t understand it unless you’ve experienced it. You can’t. And I’ve been selfish not to encourage you to do it.”

“No ...”

“Yes.” She takes a drink from the glass in front of her that Andy hopes is full of water.

“I’m forty-six,” Andy says bleakly.

“I’m seventy-one,” Miranda responds. She is looking levelly at Andy, and she is looking seventy-one. She is in a field where her appearance is part of her livelihood, and of course she has had some work done. Minimal, in deference to Andy’s preference and her own dignity, but excellent, and she is the best seventy-one a woman can be, and still. She does not merely have laugh lines; her skin is taking on the paperiness of age. In an earlier century she would already be a crone. She requires extra time on the stairs and more rest than she used to and the benefit of the doubt.

She is still the best thing, the only thing. She is the center of Andy’s world, as she has been since Andy accidentally wandered into her implacable orbit at the tender age of twenty-four, and Andy has less than no desire for there to be another center.

But.

“Men,” Miranda says, “have children this late. Later. It is—Perhaps it’s a feminist frontier.”

Andy drops her head into her hands. She doesn’t want this permission. She doesn’t want there to be anything but a stark choice, because if having a baby means not having Miranda then the decision is easy. If it means merely— _merely_ —making Miranda unhappy or inconvenienced, then it’s messy; then there are weights and measures too complicated to contemplate. 

“Let’s go up,” she says, and Miranda nods.

They climb into bed, both quieter than usual. Andy feels too drained to talk, and too afraid that she’ll say something irreparable. It is impossible to know what Miranda feels. She has her face set in her calmest expression, the one that gives no clue to what she’s thinking; it is, to Andy, her most terrifying. Andy relies on her ability to anticipate Miranda’s needs and moods to keep their shared life smooth, and that ability is founded on reading the very tiny, very subtle cues Miranda gives. Tonight she gives nothing. 

Andy tries to settle into bed. Miranda is not a cuddler; at the very most loving of moments she doesn’t snuggle up to Andy. But when they’re together in bed she does, always, maintain a touch. She will press the side of her calf to Andy’s, or put her hand, palm down, under Andy’s hip. Andy blinks into the dark, waiting, waiting … but Miranda remains completely, forbiddingly on her own side of the bed.

They lie together, parallel stiff lines under the covers. Andy thinks, I am never going to be able to sleep. I may never sleep again. The minutes drag as she stares out into the gloomy room. She wishes that she could use this time somehow, but the same anxiety that is keeping her from rest is also keeping her from any organized, useful thought. All she can do is watch as her mind skips from one disjointed, remembered moment to another. I’m a mother. No, I don’t. You would have had your own? A feminist frontier. It’s not too late. My eggs are half Mom. 

Even this, however, is no match for the emotional and physical exhaustion that has chased Andy all day. She sees midnight on the clock that glows next to the bed and one o’clock as well, but not two. She wakes briefly for two-thirty; mercifully she misses three, and four, and five. It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing.

 

_Wednesday, December 29_  


The only thing Andy says to Cassidy and Caroline the next day is, “Don’t do anything, okay?” Their response—Caroline merely nods and says, “All right,” and Cassidy, across town, texts a wordless thumbs-up—tells her that they have gotten the message. She wants the option open; she wants those eggs to stay where they are.

And then she thinks. Oh God, she thinks. She has never thought so much about anything in her life. It’s not as if she’d never thought through all of this before: When she was in her mid-thirties, she and Miranda had processed (a word and concept she hates) this very issue for months. Did Andy want a child, could Miranda mother another child? The answers then, after tortuous debate, had been Not enough, and No.

Then, she’d been reluctant to saddle sixty-year-old Miranda with diapers and sleep deprivation; she’d been reluctant even to imagine a new college graduate with an eighty-plus parent. Now, of course, the picture is even starker than it had been. And yet the choice is different, also. She has the opportunity, a last opportunity, to carry a piece of Miranda—a piece that Andy might have during the many years she will endure without her. 

This is the point in the endless thought loop when Andy cries. Because Miranda, Miranda who creates the order in her existence, Miranda whom she loves and needs above all things, more than even Miranda herself knows—Miranda will die, and Andy will outlive her. Andy has been insouciant about this fact for most of their time together, because Miranda is indomitable. The last year or so, though, has seen more troublesome minor complaints: unexplained heart palpitations, back pain, insomnia. Miranda has acquired a cardiologist and an orthopedist, the latter of which informs her that she will presently need a hip replacement. 

Miranda’s father died at fifty-nine, her mother at seventy-three. She is not her parents, of course, but she has, inarguably, already lived the lion’s share of the time she will spend on earth. Miranda will die, and Andy will be alone. 

Is that a good enough reason to have a child? To disrupt the life that she and Miranda have now? She tries to imagine the life this baby might have: elderly parents (sooner or later, parent), half siblings (or whatever they would be) three decades older. Is she merely pushing her own prospective loneliness forward a generation?

Then she begins to imagine her own loneliness, and the only thing that allows her to bear it is her hazy conjuration of that child. A child of her body, with some of Miranda’s features, some of Miranda’s wit and vision and steel. A future.

And the loop resets. The distant future becomes the near future. The near future is Miranda. Her Miranda-future can’t coexist with a child-future, unless it can, which she just doesn’t know.

 

After a few hours of this, when it becomes clear to her that she’s getting nowhere, Andy does what she does best: She talks to sources. 

She reaches Doug at his house in New Jersey. She can hear Caleb and Jack, who are thirteen and ten, yelling at each other in the background, which makes conversation difficult until Doug delegates the refereeing to his husband and shuts himself into the bathroom. “Of course it’s incredible. Of course it’s transformative. The stuff I cared about before—hell, I can’t even remember what I cared about before. Watching them turn into people, it’s amazing.” He pauses. “But Andy, I gotta admit, there have been a lot of days when I really envied you.” 

She doesn’t call her brother. She knows what he thinks, how he thinks, and she can’t bear hearing it. In adulthood David has become an evangelical Christian and a person she doesn’t understand. He once, in a long-ago argument, told her that not having children was selfish, but he also thinks lesbianism is selfish and living in a city is selfish and her career is selfish. He might want to see her procreate, but only under circumstances that will never come about, and these circumstances ... She knows he would say something unforgivable. There’s no reason to give him the chance.

Her sister, Christina, she expects to be ambivalent. She’s heard enough muttered imprecations about Chris’s lost career opportunities to paper a room with them. But to her surprise, Chris is full of tender excitement for her. “Andy, that’s amazing. Amazing! I always thought you should have had kids. You’d be such a great mom. You _will_ be such a great mom.” Andy bites back her immediate question, which is, Why? What qualifies her for motherhood, other than owning a uterus?

Andy leaves her mother until last. Her mother will either be ecstatic at the possibility and begin making plans for the layette, or she’ll be horrified that Andy would consider doing such a terrible thing. 

Her mom’s first response is a long silence. Then, “Well. That’s awfully interesting.”

“Interesting?” Andy snorts. “Come on, Mom, you can come up with a better polite nothing than that.”

“Don’t be snide. It is interesting. So much to think about.” She sighs. “There’s no question that you kids were the best thing I ever did. The most important.”

“But…” Andy hears the reservation in her mom’s voice and prompts her for the sequel.

Another sigh. “But. Your dad and I … We were twenty-five when we married, and really we hardly knew each other. We thought we did, of course, but … Anyway, then you kids came along, and we were so busy—Richard worked all the time, and I was raising you three and working, too, and there was just always something. It wasn’t until you and then your sister and brother were grown and gone that we got to be married. Just married. And that was the best part of our marriage, Andy. Not maybe the best part of our lives, but the best part of our marriage.” She laughed. “It was hard, of course, I don’t need to tell you that being married is hard.” More tenderly, she added, “But it was so wonderful.”

Andy says quietly, “And then Dad died.”

“Then he died.” They are both silent for a moment. 

“I suppose,” her mother goes on brightly, “you and Miranda have had that part of your marriage already.”

“Yeah,” Andy says slowly.

“It’s just … It won’t come back. You’ll love your children like nothing else. But you won’t get that part of your marriage back, Andy. By the time your kids are grown and gone …” She doesn’t finish.

She doesn’t have to. Andy has done the math. Ninety: Miranda will be ninety. She herself will be sixty-five, give or take.

“Now that Dad is gone,” Andy says, and stops. She doesn’t want to ask the next question, for her mother’s sake and her own, but it is important. She clears her throat. “Now that Dad is gone, is it easier that you at least have us?”

“Hm.” Her mother makes a surprised but thoughtful sound, and takes a moment before she replied. “In other words, would it be harder to have lost him if I didn’t have you children? If I were alone?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Andy says.

Her mother’s voice is sad. “Honey, I am alone.” 

The words, their direct, heavy truth, strike Andy a dull blow right in the center of her chest. She can’t keep herself from a gasp. The depth of her mother’s pain and solitude hits her in full for the first time.

“Oh, honey,” her mom says. “I don’t say that to make you feel bad. It’s just the truth. You and your brother and sister, you’re in my thoughts and my heart all the time, but you’re not here, and frankly I don’t want you here.” Andy laughs shakily at that. “You aren’t the center of my life any more, sweetheart. And you shouldn’t be. You’d hate it if you were. I love you and I love that you exist, but ...” There is another long pause. “I have three wonderful kids. And my husband is dead. Those are two separate things. You want to know if the first one makes the second one easier to bear?”

Andy opens her mouth to ... what? There isn’t anything for her to say. 

Her mother says the hard thing, the only thing. “No.”

 

_Friday, December 31_  


Two days later Andy comes home from work late, exhausted but satisfied; she’s spent the day cutting and doing voiceover for a new piece, and it feels good. It’s close enough to right that she’s confident it will be all the way there by the time it drops on Monday, though she’ll have to work over the weekend. 

There are voices in the kitchen, and she smiles. Even better. She wanted this opportunity and she’s glad it’s come so soon. She kicks off her shoes, pushing them into the hall closet with one foot (it’s automatic by now, she does not consciously think of Miranda’s reaction to stray shoes in the front hall), and pads down the hall in her socks. 

All of them are in there. Cassidy is cooking, Miranda on a stool at the island with a baby and a glass of wine, Derrick at the edge of the breakfast nook with the other baby and a bottle of beer, and Caroline dancing around through the open space. 

“Gig tonight?” Andy asks Caroline, who is made up for stage lights. 

Caroline nods and twirls slowly, singing under her breath.

“Solo?”

“Nope, with the trio.” She grins. “It’ll be quite a challenge. We haven’t rehearsed in weeks, what with the end-of-semester crunch and then aunthood.”

“The babies will stay here with us,” Miranda says, “so that Cassidy and Derrick can go.” Andy leans in and kisses her, tastes the wine on her lips. 

She pours her own glass, takes the stool next to Miranda, and accepts a plate of stir-fry, but before she takes a bite she says, “I’m glad you’re all here. I want to say something, and I’m just as happy not to have to say it three times.” She notes the very slight stiffening of the whole room, the quick glance between Caroline and Cassidy.

“First off, I want to say thank you,” she says to the twins—the adult twins. “It’s incredibly generous, and incredibly brave. By offering what you did, you told me that you were willing to enter a complicated lifelong relationship with me.”

“What, we don’t already have a complicated lifelong relationship with you?” Caroline can’t resist the low-hanging fruit.

“True,” Andy says, laughing. “A _different_ complicated lifelong relationship.” She sobers quickly and looks then at Miranda, who is staring down at the baby in her arm, stroking its cheek, probably avoiding Andy’s eyes. “I can’t say I’ve loved having to wrestle with this whole issue, but I’m not sorry I did. It—” She swallows. “As much as Miranda and I have talked about this in the past, we were never talking about _this_. Not my having a piece of her.” Miranda looks up sharply, because they still have not talked about this, not in these words. Andy goes on, softly, and is unable to keep the longing out of her voice: “And I would like that piece of her. Very much.” She holds Miranda’s eyes with her own, and the blue gaze that can be so piercing is tender and warm, and, Andy thinks, frightened. 

Andy looks back around the room, at the three (well, five) other people in it, who are open-mouthed and silent, waiting to see where this falls out. “I’m sure you don’t really get my relationship with your mom. Hell, I don’t get my relationship with your mom, most of the time. And it’s probably just as well that you don’t, because what I feel for her doesn’t always feel good. I’m _hers_ , and that sounds romantic but sometimes it’s crazy-making.” She feels the confusion around her, and the tension from Miranda next to her, and she goes on, “Here’s the thing, though: She’s mine, too. Everybody thinks I just got absorbed into her life, and I’ve done what she wants, and I gave up my _self_. But ...” She addresses Miranda now, though she is speaking just as much to Caroline and Cassidy. “Do you remember when I got arrested?”

“Which time?” Miranda asks, with a smirk.

“The first time,” Andy says. “The important time.”

“Of course,” Miranda answers, serious now. 

“Do you guys remember?” Andy is still focused on Miranda but she glances at the twins. 

“Sure,” Caroline says, for both of them. “The challenge to the Press Act.”

It had been ten years ago. Andy had written a series of articles exposing, in rich detail, an ugly web of corruption and intimidation that stretched all the way up into the highest levels of the Trump administration. She had been set upon, as she’d expected, by a pack of federal prosecutors, but she’d refused either to recant or to reveal her sources. She’d been jailed, again as she’d expected, under the disingenuously named Patriot Press Act, which allowed the government to hold her or any other journalist indefinitely, without charge or trial, for “national security.”

“I would have stayed in jail,” Andy says. “I didn’t want to, of course, but I knew I had to. And then your mom blew into Federal Plaza, in five-inch heels and a floor-length fur coat—”

“Ankle-length,” Miranda murmured.

“—with a phalanx of lawyers, and a day later I was out. And we took that ridiculous piece of crap law all the way to the Supreme Court.” Andy couldn’t stop the smile that took over her face. “You know what she said to me?” She catches Miranda’s dismissive gesture from the corner of her eye, but she ignores it. “She said, ‘I wondered sometimes what I’d done all this for. I didn’t need it, not the money, not the influence. But now I know. It was for this.’ ” She turns and looks at Miranda, only Miranda, and she finishes, “So, yeah, I live for her, sure. But she lives for me too. And I have a piece of her.” 

Andy and Miranda stare at each other for much too long to be comfortable for everyone else. Then, finally, the baby Miranda holds makes a dissatisfied squeaky noise and struggles, and Miranda looks down and the moment is broken. 

“That’s a long-winded way of saying, I’m satisfied with what I’ve got,” Andy says. She turns her head to take in Caroline and Cassidy, who still look stunned, and she smiles. “Thank you. You’ll never know how much it meant to have this choice. To be able to say no.”

 

That night, Miranda and Andy lie in bed on their sides, belly to belly, breast to breast, naked and finally exhausted. After almost twenty years the sex they have is gentler and easier as a rule, warm and comfortable rather than fierce, but tonight has had some of the animal urgency of their first months together. 

“I would do anything for you,” Miranda says at last, breaking the satisfied silence with unexpected words.

Andy studies her, as best she can in the dimness. The room is lit only by a candle on Miranda’s nightstand. “I know,” she says at last. 

“But I’m glad you don’t make me.” Miranda’s lips curl. 

Andy laughs, big and deep from her abdomen. “I save it,” she says, “for the big things.” As soon as she says it, she winces.

“This is a big thing,” Miranda says quietly.

“Would have been,” Andy agrees, slipping an arm around Miranda, tracing nonsense patterns on her shoulder blade. 

Miranda slides her palm up Andy’s arm, reaches her neck, her jaw, her ear. “You’re sad,” she says.

Andy considers saying no, but thinks better of it. Miranda usually knows when she’s lying. “Sure,” she says. “A little. I probably always will be.” She watches Miranda’s face as she says it, seeing, to her relief, understanding and not guilt. “But it’s the right thing. It was the right decision ten years ago, and it’s the right decision now.”

Miranda merely nods. 

“When I chose you,” Andy goes on, thinking carefully about how she will say this, “I knew there were things I was giving up as well as things I was getting. The things I was getting were more important to me.” She sees the slight smile on Miranda’s lips, but she can’t tell whether it’s pleased or sardonic. “Are more important to me, still. I know you think I got a raw deal. You think I should have had someone my own age who could have gone through all the rites and stages with me, blah blah blah.” Miranda shifts slightly, looking away from her. Andy gently puts a finger on Miranda’s chin, turns her back. “And the world out there, it thinks I got all the gold I was digging for.” Miranda’s brow creases and she opens her mouth, but Andy moves the finger from her chin to her lips, keeping her quiet. “You can all think whatever you want. I’m the one who knows.”

“And what is it that you know?” Miranda wants to sound flippant, but Andy hears the little note of desperation.

Andy considers. “That I did all right,” she says at last. “That I maybe didn’t get everything I ever wanted, but I got what I wanted most.” She feels Miranda’s deep breath and the settling of her body, and she rolls forward to hold Miranda close and put her forehead into the crook of Miranda’s neck. She breathes in the warm air between their bodies, the scent of Miranda’s skin and, faintly, their mingled lotions and perfumes, and, strongly, sex. 

She will have Miranda as long as she has her. Then, she will have had Miranda; and that will be enough.


End file.
